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Title: Doctor Zhivago by Old Farmer's Almanac ISBN: 0-8085-1923-9 Publisher: Sagebrush Education Resources Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 Format: Library Binding Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.60 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.04 (57 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Zhivago is life and art
Comment: Before anyone should decide whether or not Doctor Zhivago is a good book, they must look into themselves and see what it is they are about, what they love, and what affects them. As with any book, there are going to be those who feel that Zhivago is horrible because famous and illustrious novelists (like Mr. Nabokov) did not agree with the approach Pasternak took to writing his novel (but Nabokov also criticized Dostoevsky's books for quite the same reasons, so does this mean that Crime and Punishment and The Idiot and Karamazov are not artistic novels?). Before anyone decides to defer to Nabokov's opinion, he should realize why Nabokov said those things. Reading a Nabokovian book is so much different from Doctor Zhivago. Nabokov's novels are well planned out, with biblical, Shakespearean, and Poe-etical imagery aplenty. His language in general, in every novel, short story, and poem, is spectacular and to be worshipped. His themes dealt with extraordinary events in common life. Nabokov is an artist in the sense of a Renaissance painter.
But Pasternak is not that way, almost quite the opposite. He set out to write a great novel, and I suppose he has done so in many circles of readers. And of those, I am sure that many think the book is great because of the epic events (the revolution), the epic characteristics (the journey), and the eternal themes (love and war, death and separation). But what great book by Tolstoy doesn't have those? What I see with Doctor Zhivago is the way Pasternak treats everyday, common place events. This is the best book, the only book, I have read to take normal events, ones which I see myself going through everyday, and put them into words that are poetic, flowing, and so representative of the truth. The characters may not rival those of Dickens, or the plot may have loopholes and deadends which scream at you HORRIBLE, but those are not the only, or even the most important, characteristics of a novel which defines its greatness.
For this book to be considered art, it shouldn't be looked at with a mathematician's eye, quantifying how many cardboard characters there are, how often Pasternak expounds his own philosophy in similar ways with different characters, or how many times a chapter pops up which is totally different in style and format to the rest of the book and detracts from the novel's flow. Art is not an additive process, but something that occurs inside of the reader, viewer, or listener. And for a book in the last half of the 20th century to create that makes it special, and something to be respected. At least for me. This book has done more inside of me than any other. Not because of its flimsy characters or loose plot arrangement, but because of how it describes life with the poet's simplicity, and creates art from such a simple life.
Rating: 4
Summary: Combination of heavy philosophy with a beautiful soap opera
Comment: This is a worthwhile read. After plodding through the beginning, I, too, fell in love with Lara. I could not put the book down any time her character and her relationship with Zhivago was discussed. The more high brow and intellectually challenging parts of the book that focus on the foredoomed defeat of a poetic free spirit by politics (and not necessarily Soviet politics)were, I felt, too tedious and plodding to qualify the novel among the genuine Russian classics. There is no real plot. The lingering impression is of a beautiful love story, set against a less beautiful and compelling but still profound philosophical and political background. The soap opera wins out.
Rating: 4
Summary: Commendable and admirable but ultimately flawed effort
Comment: I've been a fan of Pasternak the poet and human being for a long time. His poetry is beautiful, reflecting his deep love of nature and his native land, and I've always found it moving how in 1947 he befriended the then-fourteen-year-old poet Andrey Voznesenskiy after he sent him some of his poetry, mentoring him and treating him like his equal instead of a stupid kid who worshipped the ground he walked on. It's a shame I can't be as big an admirer of Pasternak as a novelist, though this book is a very commendable and admirable effort, and certainly isn't badly-written. The descriptions of nature, for example, are quite beautiful, and it's clear that he loved his native land and was devastated by what befell it following the Revolution.
Pasternak was, first and foremost, a very talented and gifted poet, but it's painfully obvious that he didn't have an equal talent for prose. Maybe if he had written other novels his ability in that genre might have improved, but it remains quite obviously a first and only novel. Some of the metaphors, similes, and descriptions he uses are lovely, reflecting his talent as a poet, but some just sound and look laughable and embarrassing when in the form of prose. Some other mistakes are the ones other reviewers have also pointed out-way too much background information on minor characters, no real development of the supposed love story between Yuriy and Lara, let alone on why they got together, no closure of anything at the end, a mostly dead-end and pointless Epilogue and Conclusion (where interesting events begin to be developed but then peter off into nothingness since it's so close to the end there's no time to see them through to their conclusions), characters who disappear for hundreds of pages, too much telling and not enough showing, and way too many coincidences. It's embarrassing how many times Yuriy or someone else bumps back into someone whom we last saw hundreds of pages ago, a truly minor character in most cases, and that chance meeting years later contributes nothing to the plotline.
When they finally get together properly, Yuriy spends more time writing poetry after Lara has fallen asleep than in bed with her, this woman he keeps running into for longer and more significant periods of time, whom he realised he was in love with right before he was kidnapped by the partisans who needed a doctor. I get absolutely no sense whatsoever of why these two fall in love, no sense of why they get together, no sense of them being in love period when they're finally a couple. Why do so many writers insist on having the characters fall into one another's arms with barely a word of explaining their feeling or motivations? There are no love scenes, sex scenes, sweet nothings, nothing that would clearly show them as being a couple madly in love and fated to have gotten together years after having first met.
The book should have properly ended at the end of Chapter 15, sparing us the pointless Epilogue and Conclusion. Then I wouldn't have felt like "That's it?" at the real end of the book. We don't even find out what happens to Lara's daughter Katya, and for a man who was heartbroken while watching Lara and Katya's sleigh pass his field of vision twice in the night, knowing he'd never see them again, he sure doesn't act like it once he goes home. He doesn't go after his family in Paris, he doesn't try to find Lara, he enters a relationship with his childhood friend Marina! What is that all about?
The best part of the book is when Yuriy, Lara, and their friends are all growing up, showing the two different worlds they came from, how Russia was before the Revolution. I still admire Pasternak both as a writer and a human being, but this book remains a nice story that could have been so much more realistic and convincing had it been written by someone with more experience at writing prose.
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Title:Doctor Zhivago (Two-Disc Special Edition) ASIN: B00003CX9M Publisher: Warner Home Video Pub. Date: 24 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.99 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $20.24 |
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Title: Anna Karenina by Mona Simpson, Leo Tolstoy ISBN: 067978330X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Rosemary Edmonds ISBN: 0140444173 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: October, 1982 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title:Doctor Zhivago (TV Miniseries) ASIN: B0000C2IQG Publisher: Acorn Media Publishi Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $35.96 |
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Title: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Alexander Tvardovsky ISBN: 0451527097 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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